A network firewall may provide a number of functions to help control the flow of information out of and/or into a secure network. Filters, such as firewall filters for network devices, may generally be program-based applications where an entire filter definition is taken into account and compiled to create a filter blob (or binary large object). In a dynamic filter context, a set of rules for the filter may frequently change as rule modifications, additions, and/or deletions occur. To incorporate changes in the filter definition, the filter blob is entirely replaced with a newly compiled filter blob.